Footers on a website are vital to ensuring a pleasant perusing experience.
Upon perusing an assortment of robust website designs, one will discern that their footers feature an exceptionally usable design and layout. Given the importance of the footer to the overall user experience, this is no accident.
The utilisation of the website footer to retain visitors after they have reached the bottom of a page is highly effective. Typically, it exhibits menu items that provide additional information regarding the organisation and its offerings. It may contain details such as contact and support information, or it may be limited to navigational elements.
It is of the utmost importance that SEO provides visitors with vital information, including contact information and site policies. Additionally, conversion factors, such as discounts or special offers, should be incorporated.
A heatmap can provide a wealth of valuable information regarding the most frequently utilised elements of your footer. You might be astonished by the frequency with which it is utilised: Above all else, the footer serves as the last impression visitors have of any page they encounter upon entering your website. Therefore, it is critical that it be informative, user-friendly, and readily accessible.
Consequently, a meticulously crafted footer has the potential to notably enhance visitor retention and efficiently direct them to additional sections of the website.
Using the best practises for website footers to improve the user experience, this guide will instruct you.
1. Keep Them Simple
The structure of the footer of your website should facilitate navigation. The objective is to guarantee that all necessary information is readily accessible to visitors without requiring them to scroll back to the top; otherwise, they may become disinterested.
Prioritise the critical elements, including contact details, primary pages, and hyperlinks to social media platforms. When there are numerous links to organise on the screen, such as those to product categories or services, vertical alignment is an effective method.
When incorporating an image, select one that exhibits legibility and comprehension at a reduced dimension. Complicated graphs and statistics should be avoided.
Examine the content of the footer on the Ahrefs website. They have included a hiring link that is both well-organized and straightforward to navigate, in addition to a distinct image of their team. An additional link was arranged in a logical container fashion, following a vertical structure.
Additionally, their About page is located in the footer menu, not the primary menu. Footer menus are an ideal location to include links to content that is not pertinent to the main objective of the majority of site visitors.
There should be no complexity to the design. Employ typography and colours that establish a unified aesthetic throughout your website; these should correspond to your brand strategy and be present in your social media posts, emails, advertisements, and other digital materials.
With the proper margin and spacing, the footer of a website can appear more streamlined and legible across multiple devices. By maintaining consistency in font size, weight, line height, and letter spacing, one can enhance the visual allure of a website, project a more professional image, and effectively meet accessibility objectives.
2. Include Links to Basic Pages
This best practise for website footers relates to navigation. To prevent users from having to scroll back up, an effective footer should comprise the most important options and groupings from the primary menu.
Internal links to your homepage (typically a linked logo), the about us page, careers content, and products or services are included in these navigation options.
In order to enhance the efficiency of your link organisation, classify links into distinct and pertinent categories such as Products, Services, or Company.
One potential approach is to employ the heading ‘Learn’ and provide links to the various categories if one possesses an extensive assortment of case studies and blogs. This will facilitate the navigation of your website and the discovery of beneficial content by visitors.
Choosing the primary content and structure of your essential footer links with attention will not only improve the navigation of your website. Additionally, you can assist in optimising your SEO. A navigation that is well-organized will aid search engine algorithms in comprehending your most vital pages. These influences your credibility and trustworthiness, both of which are crucial in SEO.
Bear in mind that footer links should not comprise the entirety of a page. They should not attempt to supplant the primary menu navigation of the website for the sake of a minimalist aesthetic. Oversimplification negatively impacts the user experience.
3. Include Newsletter Signup Form
Additionally, a newsletter registration form can be integrated into the website’s footer to facilitate the collection and validation of email addresses for the subscriber list. It makes sense to position content in the footer, given that website visitors will likely browse to the bottom of the page in search of blog links or contact information. They will not overlook your lead-generation form when they do so.
Even in the footer, the form for your newsletter must stand out. Even if your form is seamlessly integrated with the other components, it is still possible for visitors to overlook it.
In numerous methods, it is possible to distinguish your form. As an example, Bria strategically positioned its own in the exact centre of the website’s footer. In addition, the form occupies a considerable amount of space.
Caution should be exercised when implementing this approach. There should be a restricted number of fields on your form. It is not desirable for visitors to become deterred by the extensive number of required fields. Five form fields is the maximum that Gartner suggests for increased conversions.
Sign off by ensuring that your call to action is both persuasive and straightforward. Additionally, your CTA should be distinct. As demonstrated in our Bria example, one may select a CTA colour that contrasts with the remainder of the form’s colour scheme.
4. Insert Legal Information
It is customary to include the authorship and proprietorship of a website in the footer section.
Legal specifics must be included in the footer of your website, as your privacy statement is vital to SEO. This information is provided to safeguard your creative works and to furnish crucial particulars regarding the proprietorship and usage rights of the website.
The following legal alternatives are frequently listed in the footers of websites: Privacy Statement
Cookie Regulations
Return Procedure
Conditional Terms and Conditions
Commercial licences
Facilit Accessibility
Guaranteed Security
Attribution and/or copyright information
“Follow these user experience tips, and you’ll keep visitors exploring your site and coming back for return visits. “
